by Jules Witcover

During the Cold War, American anti-Communist hawks led by Ronald Reagan advocated huge buildups in military spending as a means of forcing the Soviet Union to compete, and into bankruptcy and collapse. The strategy was known in some quarters then as "starving the beast."

The notion was that by spending billions on that buildup and on such unproven concepts as missile defense -- "Star Wars" in the derogatory Democratic put-downs -- the Soviet Union could be goaded into spending itself into the poorhouse, and bringing down its despised ideology.

When the Reagan-styled "evil empire" eventually did go belly up in 1991, his acolytes credited him with the deed, though many contemporary Sovietologists insisted that the "beast" had crumpled of its own corruption and incompetence.

In the current Republican surge of domestic budget slashing in the name of cutting the size of the American federal bureaucracy, we're seeing today the domestic version of starving the beast. By riding the tiger of rampant budget-cutting with newly elected tea-party congressmen holding the reins, the Republicans are taking dead aim at the Democratic concept of government as referee in an endless "class warfare."

That concept took root in the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. New agencies interceding on behalf of the most disadvantaged Americans endured in what came to be called "the social safety net." Its construction gave the party of FDR a firm grip on the American middle class that was greatly expanded by the policies of the New Deal.

While that grip has been substantially loosened, as safety-net policies have been derogated by critics as a socialistic redistribution of wealth, the Democratic Party's identification as the defender of lower-income Americans endures, with President Obama the latest Democrat to claim it.

The party's building of the middle class in the 1930s sparked the rise of organized labor and the recruitment of working-class Americans into its political ranks. Unions challenged the Republican concept of business dominance in the workplace, as the labor movement expanded in the industrial North and Midwest, with about a third of the national workforce becoming unionized.

After World War II, however, the growth of the labor movement was stymied in the American South, and erosion eventually set in elsewhere, especially in the private sector. Now only about 12 percent of the workforce holds union cards, nearly half in the public sector.

Organized labor in the course of this decline has poured millions and millions of dollars into political activities on behalf of the Democratic Party and its candidates. Yet it has been frustrated by Republican policies hampering membership recruitment, and even has seen Republicans make political inroads among union members, as in the case of the so-called Reagan Democrats.

Obama's 2008 election marked a modest revival of organized labor support, but its leadership has been disappointed with the administration's failure to enact pro-labor legislation, and with its recent flirtation with corporate America in the wake of the deep Democratic losses in the midterm elections.

The plight of organized labor in the public sector has now been spotlighted in Wisconsin, where newly elected Republican Gov. Scott Walker has pushed through the state legislature a budget-slashing bill that also would diminish the collective bargaining rights of state workers. It would allow negotiations over wages only, not other issues of employment and recruitment the unions consider vital and constitutionally guaranteed.

The massive protest is spreading to other states like Ohio, Indiana and New Jersey, where other Republican governors, all like Walker required by state law to achieve a balanced budget, have taken actions perceived by organized labor as also a denial of the right to bargain collectively.

In the course of that balanced-budget pursuit, these GOP governors are waging ideological battle by trying to starve the beast of labor political clout, which has already been sorely diminished by the passage of time.

Each party repeatedly accuses the other of engaging in class warfare -- the Democrats pitting the poor and middle-class workers against the rich, the Republicans vice versa. Both are right, unfortunately, but the clash is inevitable in a society in which economic inequality and disparity are growing realities.

 

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Starving the Domestic Beast | Politics

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